“2020 is the best F* year of my life YAAAY!”. It would be safe to assume that who ever says this has recently undergone a serious brain surgery that didn’t turn out so well. If not, their comment will be, undoubtly, welcomed with a sustained judgemental stare.
Ladies and gentleman, before we throw serious shade to this imaginary individual, let us take a minute to do the unthinkable. Let us reevaluate our ruthless verdict against year 2020. For that, I invite you to rewind one year. Shall we?
Welcome to September 21st, 2019. It is a beautiful morning out in Toronto. Per usual, people walked their dogs while subtly avoiding eye contact. Per usual, I stopped at my neighborhood coffee shop to catch up on reading but ended up doom scrolling. After one hour of endless bad news, I sensed a feeling of disgust building up within me. Between inflammatory refugee crisis in Europe, horrifying child detention centers in US and casual Muslim genocide in Myanmar, I was losing faith in humanity.
People seemed to focus more on the differences that separated us rather than the similarities that united us--and, there is a bunch of those. Slowly, the world has fallen into a feast of normalized hate and discrimination against the “foreigner”. The world was binge drinking on Nationalism.
March 10th, 2020, I landed in Tunis to spend a 3 weeks vacation with my family. Three days later, the country shut down its borders and declared state of emergency. My 3 weeks turned into 4 months before I could fly out of the country again. Suddenly, all humans got to star in the RL version of Contagion trying to survive Covid-19. The shift has begun...
Just like that, we all received our very own invitation to a one-on-one with an indisputable common certainty to all of us in this planet: Mortality (sorry for the morbidity)!
We surely knew all along that we were not immortal. But, the difference during this crisis is that we are all facing the same threat due to the same cause at the same time no matter where we were located in this planet. It is the first time we go throughout the same crisis as one unit- Humans. Here we are stripped bare from all our superficial layers; language, money, job title etc. For the first time, we are forced to look beyond the surface and dive deep into our real needs.
And, what do we discover? Well, we learn that we all share the same core needs: Safety and Tribe. Looks familiar? Yes, still our essential needs are the same than our dinosaur-hunting ancestors. Let me explain...
1. SAFETY
Following the virus outbreak, we witnessed all countries issuing unprecedented steps to protect their own people except few examples (Sweden we see you). Travel ban, Lockdowns, social distancing, masks, sanitizers are just few of these measures that people adopted to protect themselves and those around them. Our first reaction when meeting “the enemy”, our visceral survival instinct kicked in and nothing else mattered besides making it to the next day-Alive. That was the objective of everyone no matter their origin.
2. TRIBE
In the middle of the craziness, something else happened. In our despair, we reached out to our loved ones; moved into the parents home, had actual phone calls with friends and helped out our community. We needed these connections to nourish our souls along with protecting our bodies. Covid-19 pushed us to face our true needs deprived of all the excess and surprise, surprise...these happen to be exactly the same wherever we are in this planet. Whether you were in NYC or Namibia, whether you spoke Arabic or Hebrew, whether you ate with chopsticks or not, your two main hopes during this crisis are: 1. Protect your body 2. Connect with your tribe. Covid-19 is a reminder of who we are at our core--What really matters. This, in return, begs the question: If we are sharing the same core needs then why are we fighting for the superficial layers?
Needless to say that 2020 is not winning the award of best year but I dare hoping that it represents the awfully painful yet necessary spark that we needed to awake to our humanity. I hope that voices against unfairness get louder and louder. We already witnessed the outburst of brave movements defying injustice such as Black Lives Movement. Is the timeline just a coincidence or the work for a united world has begun? I dare to hope that it is the latter. What about you?
-End-
